Qualcomm Launching Snapdragon 820 Today Confirms Company

Ah the Snapdragon 820. After having a bad year with the 810, Qualcomm was eager to show off a successor to the overheating chipset that had a lot of expectations attached to it at the time of its launch. The Snapdragon 810 chose to utilize ARM’s Cortex cores in big.LITTLE which became a bit too prone to overheating and managed to affect manufacturers and users all around. But that’s a thing of the past, and after a gradual buildup of things, Qualcomm will finally be unveiling the Snapdragon 820 today at 12:15 PM ET.

Qualcomm All Set To Unveil The Snapdragon 820 Today

According to a tweet by the company’s Marketing Leader, Tim McDonough, Qualcomm is finally ready to take the wraps off of the Snapdragon 820. The processor is taking a completely new approach towards things, with the return of Krait in the the form of its very own Kryo cores that are expected to reach frequencies as high as 2.5GHz according to information that has been provided by the company and surfaced in the leak chain so far.

In addition to Kryo, the Snapdragon 820 will also be coming with an all new Adreno 530 GPU on board which will be focusing particularly on Virtual Reality, according to another post by Qualcomm today. On the topic of overheating, McDonough also claims that the processor is meeting or beating OEM thermal requirements, which should come as a sigh of relief to many after we saw throttling reports surface once again about the chip earlier.

Alongside the Adreno 530, the Snapdragon 820 will also be coming with Qualcomm’s Hexagon 680 DSP and the two combined with Kryo will be taking the chipset closer to heterogeneous computing. For connectivity, the Snapdragon 820 will be coming with 600Mbps Cat 12 LTE downlink and 150Mbps Cat 13 uplink speeds, which the company claims are the first of their kind in mobile hardware history.

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Its going to be manufactured on the 14nm FinFET node, courtesy of none other than Samsung, so we should also expect the Snapdragon 820 to come with significant power, conduction and thermal improvements as well. Its the latter that Qualcomm should be focusing on particularly if it intends to stay as one of the top providers of mobile silicon in the industry.

820 is turning out amazing and meeting or beating OEM thermal requirements. You'll feel cool having an 820 phone. https://t.co/MdlXiG3aGy

After all, things aren’t what they used to be in the mobile hardware industry a year ago particularly after Samsung’s launch of the Exynos 7420, a processor that stole the throne from the US manufacturer. Samsung’s also got a successor prepared for the Exynos, the Exynos 8890 which itself should offer some good competition to Qualcomm and choice to the end consumer.

The Exynos 8890 will be coming with Samsung’s custom Mongoose ‘M1‘ cores which marks a significant shift from ARM’s Cortex series for both the manufacturers. According to some leaked benchmarks, the Exynos has managed to outperform the 820 in overall scores achieved, but we’re going to have to wait for some conclusive, first-hand results to reach any definite conclusions. Till then, stay tuned for the Snapdragon 820‘s launch and let us know what you think in the comments section below.